There has been proposed an apparatus for playing and viewing contents such as video, music, and other contents in a manner to keep the video, music, and other contents viewable continuously when the contents being viewed are stopped or temporarily stopped, by storing, in the apparatus, a play position upon stoppage of the contents in relation to the contents being viewed, and resuming the play from the stop position based on the information stored in the apparatus when the user instructs the apparatus to play the contents again.
Patent document 1 discloses an apparatus in which when the play of a content is stopped, a program number and a sub-code of a time code are simultaneously read, and saved and stored in a nonvolatile memory, and when a content is to be played, the program number and the time code are read from the nonvolatile memory to start reading data from a corresponding position on the disk.
Patent document 2 discloses an apparatus which holds a memory card, and, when the user interrupts the play of a moving image file, writes a time code at the moment into the memory card. When the moving image file is to be played next time, the time code is read to avoid the trouble of finding where to start the moving image file.
The content playing apparatus disclosed in Patent documents 1, 2 realize continuous play by storing program numbers and time codes, which are unique to the content playing apparatus, in a nonvolatile memory device in a terminal with respect to programs and music pieces that are being played. However, the content playing apparatus suffers from the following problems:
Since the information about a play start point is provided as a combination of a program number and a time code that are unique to the content playing apparatus, the information about the play start point is effective only in the same terminal. Therefore, the content playing apparatus is unable to lend itself to play start point control between a plurality of terminals such as continuous viewing on a plurality of terminals.
The play start point is saved in the form of a program number and a time code in the attached memory in the apparatus. The content playing apparatus does not have a mechanism for allowing the user to select one of a plurality of start point candidates for the same program. The content playing apparatus is unable to control play start points for respective users or to control play start points depending on how the user uses the content playing apparatus or the situation in which the user is placed, based on the log of play details in a plurality of terminals. For example, the content playing apparatus cannot be used to perform a process in which the user views a program on a playing apparatus in a living room, then continuously views the program on a mobile terminal, thereafter views the program on the playing apparatus in the living room regardless of what the user viewed on the mobile terminal, and then views the program on a playing apparatus in the user's own room from the point where the user has stopped viewing the program using the playing apparatus in the living room.
Play start points are generated and updated in a terminal based only on the playing action of the user. Therefore, the content playing apparatus fails to share a certain play situation among a plurality of users, e.g., fail to perform a process in which a user sets a play start point and then causes other users of a plurality of terminals to start playing the content from the same play start point.
If programs stored in a plurality of terminals are not fully identical to each other, then continuous viewing cannot be realized. For example, if recording times of programs are not synchronized and not in full agreement with each other, or if one or both of the contents stored in a plurality of apparatuses are different because of cutting and editing, then since the program IDs are not identical and since the time codes cannot be used, the content cannot be continuously played.    Patent document 1: JP05-036192A (paragraphs 0007-0009)    Patent document 2: JP2003-333521A (paragraphs 0031-0034)